Creative Becoming
Mar 29, 2025
Written By James Hill Jr
Mantra:
I am not the ruins. I am the weaver of what rises from them.
Centering Thought:
I didn’t run to the university looking for prestige. I didn’t even know what tenure was when I first stepped onto campus. I didn’t care about research packages or faculty lounges. I wasn’t seduced by the architecture or the mascot or the promise of job openings down the line.
What I wanted—achingly, urgently—was some-kind-of-something that might hold me.
I believed that in the university, I might find others who were also searching. I believed that in the classroom, in the student lounge, in the library, I might stumble into the kind of sustainable community I had never known. Not the institution itself, but the practice of study, the shared fire of inquiry, the soulwork of gathering around ideas—weighing them, turning them, asking what they might demand of us. That was the promise I chased.
I believed, and still believe (hope against hope), that people come to study not just to earn credentials, but to find an anchor. To tether themselves to others who are also trying to hold on.
My brother-in-the-struggle Jorge Rodriguez once told me, “If academia shut down tomorrow, I’d be fine.” We were both graduate students at the time, held together by weary well-doing and boundless ambition. I remember pausing when he said it, trying to imagine what that kind of confidence felt like. “I wish I could say the same,” I told him. But I couldn’t.
Jorge could say that because he was grounded in other institutions—not the bureaucratic kind, but the kind shaped by custom, by ritual, by practice, by kin. He was anchored in family rhythms that would continue no matter what the university decided. Institutions that preceded the academy and would outlast it.
I didn’t have that. Not in the same way.
The institutions I came from were already unraveling. My family was not so much unreliable as they were haunted—by trauma, by silence, by the kinds of trouble that echo through generations. The churches I knew as a child offered both shelter and shame. I was never quite sure when they would bless me or break me.
So I went to the university hoping that—just maybe—it could hold me. Hoping that in this place devoted to thought and study and language, I might finally find the kind of community that didn’t collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
But over time, the university revealed itself, too. Not all at once, but piece by piece. A seminar room became a site of surveillance. The student lounge became empty. Conversations became performances. Committees replaced communities. I watched people bend their brilliance into shapes that would fit a CV. I did it, too.
Until I began to choose differently.
Not once, not in one moment—but slowly, tremblingly, I began to choose the path of the artist. I began to listen more closely to the longings that couldn’t be made legible to committees. I began to nurture projects that refused to be absorbed into a dossier. I began to follow the rhythm of something deeper than productivity, deeper than institutional reward.
I am still learning how to do this.
To be a writer of short stories and children’s literature, someone committed to weaving possibility with words, may not be enough to grant me tenure within my discipline. But it might just sustain my life. It might call forth the kind of community I dreamed about in those early years. It might create the mysticism of understanding, the trembling wonder of witnessing deep call out too deep.
This is what I mean by creative becoming.
Not a brand. Not a platform. Not a hustle.
A practice. A prayer. A promise to return again and again to the fragments and build something worthy of our weight.